


used to run in the cemetery

by OfShoesAndShips



Series: a stranger around here [2]
Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell & Related Fandoms, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (TV), Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-26
Updated: 2017-02-26
Packaged: 2018-09-27 04:08:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9960686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OfShoesAndShips/pseuds/OfShoesAndShips
Summary: A King meets his Reader, and there is a debt to be paid. A mother's brandy to be drunk.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bookhobbit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookhobbit/gifts), [35391291](https://archiveofourown.org/users/35391291/gifts).



Childermass lays on his thin bed in his room at Starecross, and stares out the window at Yorkshire. On the bedside and dressing tables candles burn themselves slowly to stubs, but they make little difference to the darkness. There is enough to see by, but only that. The clouds hang low and heavy over the moor but for all that it is not a cold night, this time. There are no wayward creaks, no bad weather. Not even a little rain. It feels to Childermass as if there should be. It is an incomplete night without it. But then, it has been an incomplete night for years now.

He finally loses his patience and gets up off the bed to turn the mirror on the dressing table to face the wall. He does not want anyone watching, not even her. He considers for a long flickering second, and then he locks the door. That doesn’t seem quite right, either. Since Segundus had strong-armed him into moving into Starecross he had left it unlocked, should he be needed in a hurry. And yet now he thinks about it, his door was only ever locked in London. In Hurtfew, too, he’d left it open. At home there hadn’t been a door to lock.

He puts the key in his waistcoat and is just about to move the table when he hears someone clear their throat.

He looks up to find the Raven King lounging on his windowseat, a glass in his hand. For a second, Childermass can’t breathe.

“There’s another on’t side,” says the Raven King, and Childermass realises he knows that voice. Realises he has known it all his life. He drifts in stockinged feet over to the bedside table, and picks up the other glass. The drink inside glows softly, but it smells like the brandy his mother used to steal off the coach as boxes were being delivered to the pub and he takes a sip.

“This is Mum’s brandy,” he says.

“It’s good,” the King says, easily, as if this were only a social call.

“I hadn’t called you yet.”

“I know. Sit, John.”

Childermass sits down on the bed and folds one leg up beneath him, gazing at the King. Waiting.

“We’ve long been entwined, you and I,” John Uskglass says to his glass, moonlight fracturing through it and breaking up the darkness, “You don’t have to call for me to hear.”

Childermass doesn’t reply, and the King stands up. The floorboards sigh under his feet as he walks over to the bed, which dips a little as he sits.

“You knew she wasn’t dead, didn’t you?” Childermass asks, and he is surprised to find how young he sounds. He grips the edge of the bed with his free hand, and wishes there was something else in the air, some other sound. In the silence he feels like he’s losing grip on himself.

“I did,” he sounds sheepish, taking a pause to sip his brandy. As he does, there comes a soft, gentle rattle from the window and Childermass looks up. Summer’s first hail has started to fall. “But there was nowt to be done.”

“Is she stuck there? In the Otherlands?”

He shrugs. In the candlelight, he looks older than the moonlight had made him. Older, Childermass remembers now, than he had looked that day on the moor. There are deep creases under his eyes, hollows in his cheeks. Childermass had thought that magic returning would catch the King in floods of youth, but perhaps the reverse is true. Perhaps it has returned kingship to a man still too young to carry it.

“Can you bring her back?” Childermass asks, feeling sympathy catch at his words.

The King nod just slightly. “There’s a price,” he says.

The sympathy vanishes like a snuffed candle and Childermass stands up, only just managing to refrain from throwing his glass across the room.

“I know the law,” he says instead, turning to face the King, “The price from one bargain may be used as payment for another. Well, you have taken two people from me, John Uskglass. You can bring one back.”

“That wasn’t the law in my day-”

“It is now. I have paid. Bring her back.” The candles flare with the force of his anger, but he catches them before they go out.

“Stubborn as your mother, you are.”

“If I were, it’d be you paying. And I’d get the full bottle of brandy into the bargain. Bring her back.”

“She’ll be an old woman, now. You might not have her long.”

Childermass laughs. He does not stop to think how unlike him it sounds. “My mother cut a bargain with you when she was barely nineteen, and you think she couldn’t cheat her way out of death at ninety?”

John Uskglass smirks. It is long and twisted and when Childermass sees it he goes still. He had not seen it, before, but his eyes are the same as Norrell’s, pale, overcast. Anxious.

 “You-” he whispers.

“Did you think it was only God who made men in his image?”

Childermass knocks back the rest of his brandy, and half-chokes. “Please,” he says, sounding old now, “I just want her back.”

The King stands, too. He steps close, until they’re toe to toe. Childermass realises numbly that he’s barefoot, too. He thinks that should humanise him, but it doesn’t, not quite.

Knowing John Uskglass to be no more than a man doesn’t make him any less of a king.

 “Please,” he whispers, again.

John Uskglass rests his hands against Childermass’s jaw, and pulls him down until their foreheads touch.

“The debt is paid,” the King says, after a long, shared breath, “The debt is paid.”


End file.
